We recently updated the way that permissions work in Basecamp to give you more control over your to-dos. Now you can you decide which people can and cannot check off to-do items.
How did the permissions work before?
When you are inside of a project, you can see the permission screen by clicking the "People & Permissions" tab and then clicking "Add people, remove people, change permissions." That screen shows you some permission options inside of a green bar for any person that belongs to a different company than your own.
When the right-most button is selected, it means the person can do everything. If the middle button is selected, the person can add/edit messages and files as well as to-dos, but not milestones. Finally when the first option, "Messages & Files" is selected, it means the person cannot change to-do items or milestones.
But there was a small wrinkle in this system. Even if somebody only had access to change messages and files, they could still check off to-do items.
How it works now
Now, if you restrict somebody's permission to only "Messages & Files", they will no longer be able to check off to-do items. You will have to give people "plus To-dos" access in order to allow them to check off items. By default, anyone you invite has full access (messages and files, to-dos and milestones). It's up to you if you'd like to restrict their permission after they are invited.
This change could affect people on your account
It's possible on many accounts that people are currently taking advantage of the old system: they were checking off to-do items even though their permission was only set to "Messages & Files." If anyone on your account complains that they can no longer check-off to-dos, you can easily fix the problem by going to the permissions screen and setting their permission to "plus To-dos".
We made this change so you can have more control over which people can check-off to-do items and which people can't. The old behavior wasn't completely logical, so we think this is an improvement and we hope it makes more sense to you too.
Best of luck with your projects,
The Basecamp team